“No. It isn’t.” There were people yet alive. I cast my reach out wide for them. Felt each beating heart. Each rise and fall of breath. Each unique energy. I wasn’t mistaken about empathy being the key to their salvation, but I’d wasted it on the wrong man. My empathy wasn’t meant for one person. It was meant to be given liberally. To all. Regardless of class. Wealth. Position. I would become one with Riaznin and let the emperor, at last, meet the reckoning of his people.
“You will not kill me because I am your empire.” I pointed beyond the marble ledge of his balcony. “Your people’s cries are my cries. Their anger is my wrath. Their suffering, my plea for retribution.” As soon as I spoke the words, a gate opened inside me. How easy it was to let them in, to let them overcome me. The quiet space within myself I’d labored so long to protect, I tore down of my own volition.
“Their auras fill me. They stretch me beyond capacity.” I gasped, shaking. “I feel myself bridge the earth and sink beneath the ground, slipping between the cold bones of the dead. Their auras join us.” I opened my hands and welcomed the connection, though it shot ice through my veins. “They cry against you. Against centuries of oppression.”
Horror filled Valko’s eyes, but he didn’t release the dagger from my chest.
“This is your day of judgment. A million voices use my mouth. They will not rest. You do not have enough gunpowder, enough armies, enough endurance to withstand them. They will keep coming. They will crawl over the corpses of their wives and their husbands, their children and their friends, their brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, and they will hunt you down.”
“Stop!” Valko dropped the dagger. It clanged against the tiles. “Do not say another word!” He clapped his hands over his ears.
The haze of the peasants’ torchlight cast my dress and skin in a scorching glow. “You do not have glory,” I said. “You are tiny. Your blood is mortal, common. Glory is godly, undefiled. And glory joins me with the holy aura of the gods.” Tears streamed down my face from the transcendent energy surging through my limbs. “You oppress your brethren in your quest for all power. That is weak. It will always be weak. No man can be all-powerful.”
Valko fell to his knees. He wrung his ears and muttered vain prayers.
I stood tall over him. “The gods wish to feed your soul to the fires of hell. You will burn in eternity for the wrongs of every emperor before you because you did nothing to stop the cycle of cruelty and tyranny against your people.”
He shook his head as if to ward me away. His incessant prayers grew louder.
“Show them you are only a man,” I commanded, and summoned his aura back inside me. It was a pitiful spark next to the powerful inferno within. I pushed my overflowing energy into him so the suffering of his people could no longer be ignored.
As their auras struck him, Valko gasped and buckled at the waist. He writhed in agony and stared up at me with astounded eyes. “Forgive me, forgive me.” He clutched at his hair.
“You do not know the meaning of mercy, and you do not have the stomach to do what it takes to redeem yourself.”
“I will do anything!”
I looked down at him, so intolerable and wretched. “I want to hear you beg.”
“I am begging!” He clung to the skirt of my dress and kissed the silk as he buried his head in its folds. “I implore you”—he rocked on his knees—“tell me what I must do!”
I deliberated a moment longer. “Rise to your feet.”
He sniffled, chin quivering as he straightened up.
“Come with me.” I led him past the doorway of his balcony, to the ledge outside where every man, woman, and child could see him. Heaps of dead peasants lay in the distance, and more than half of the Imperial Guard had fallen. Still, the lingering soldiers relentlessly fired, the peasants marched forward with their only remaining weapons. Rocks, slings, sharp sticks—anything they could hurtle between the gold bars of the gate.
“Remove your crown,” I ordered Valko. “Tell the people your reign is over. Riaznin is theirs to rule.”
His nose wrinkled in the smoke. His mouth twisted with a grimace. “Never.”
“You will, or the spirits of the dead will guide those who live to slit your throat. And when you die, the gods will torture your soul until every memory, every lie of your noble blood burns to ashes.”
With a whimper, Valko collapsed to the ground. He hid behind the balcony wall from the people. “I will die, regardless. If I abdicate, they will never allow me to live.”
“Then make a trade: your throne for the promise of a trial—the fair judgment you denied so many.” Pia. Tosya. Anton.
Valko hesitated with indecision. He wrenched into a tight ball of pain, his face blotchy as if he couldn’t draw breath. Tendons corded at his neck. Tears streaked to his jawline. Now he knew what it was to have my gift.
“Do it now, or I will kill you myself!” I said. My weapon was no saber or pistol; it was the aura of legions. And for Valko, it was threat enough.